When We're All Musteites

We
won't necessarily know what a Musteite is, but I'm inclined to think it
would help if we did. I'm using the word to mean "having a certain
affinity for the politics of A.J. Muste."

I had people tell me I was a Musteite when I had at best the vaguest
notion of who A.J. Muste had been. I could tell it was a compliment, and
from the context I took it to mean that I was someone who wanted to end
war. I guess I sort of brushed that off as not much of a compliment.
Why should it be considered either particularly praiseworthy or
outlandishly radical to want to end war? When someone wants to utterly
and completely end rape or child abuse or slavery or some other evil, we
don't call them extremist radicals or praise them as saints. Why is war
different?

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The possibility that war might not be different, that it might be
wholly abolished, could very well be a thought that I picked up
third-hand from A.J. Muste, as so many of us have picked up so much from
him, whether we know it or not. His influence is all over our notions
of labor and organizing and civil rights and peace activism. His new
biography, American Gandhi: A.J. Muste and the History of Radicalism in the Twentieth Century
by Leilah Danielson is well worth reading, and has given me a new
affection for Muste despite the book's own rather affection-free
approach.

Martin Luther King Jr. told an earlier Muste biographer, Nat Hentoff,
"The current emphasis on nonviolent direct action in the race relations
field is due more to A.J. than to anyone else in the country." It is
also widely acknowledged that without Muste there would not have been
formed such a broad coalition against the war on Vietnam. Activists in
India have called him "the American Gandhi."

The American Gandhi was born in 1885 and immigrated with his family
at age 6 from Holland to Michigan. He studied in Holland, Michigan, the
same town that we read about in the first few pages of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army,
and at a college later heavily funded by the Prince Family, from which
Blackwater sprang. The stories of both Muste and Prince begin with Dutch
Calvinism and end up as wildly apart as imaginable. At the risk of
offending Christian admirers of either man, I think neither story -- and
neither life -- would have suffered had the religion been left out.

Muste would have disagreed with me, of course, as some form of
religion was central to his thinking during much of his life. By the
time of World War I he was a preacher and a member of the Fellowship of
Reconciliation (FOR). He opposed war in 1916 when opposing war was
acceptable. And when most of the rest of the country fell in line
behind Woodrow Wilson and obediently loved war in 1917, Muste didn't
change. He opposed war and conscription. He supported the struggle for
civil liberties, always under attack during wars. The American Civil
Liberties Union (ACLU) was formed by Muste's FOR colleagues in 1917 to
treat symptoms of war, just as it does today. Muste refused to preach in
support of war and was obliged to resigned from his church, stating in
his resignation letter that the church should be focused on creating
"the spiritual conditions that should stop the war and render all wars
unthinkable." Muste became a volunteer with the ACLU advocating for
conscientious objectors and others persecuted for war opposition in New
England. He also became a Quaker.

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In 1919 Muste found himself the leader of a strike of 30,000 textile
workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, learning on the job -- and on the
picket line, where he was arrested and assaulted by police, but returned
immediately to the line. By the time the struggle was won, Muste was
general secretary of the newly formed Amalgamated Textile Workers of
America. Two years later, he was directing Brookwood Labor College
outside of Katonah, New York. By the mid-1920s, as Brookwood succeeded,
Muste had become a leader of the progressive labor movement nationwide.
At the same time, he served on the executive committee of the national
FOR from 1926-1929 as well as on the national committee of the ACLU.
Brookwood struggled to bridge many divides until the American Federation
of Labor destroyed it with attacks from the right, aided a bit with
attacks from the left by the Communists. Muste labored on for labor,
forming the Conference for Progressive Labor Action, and organizing in
the South, but "if we are to have morale in the labor movement," he
said, "we must have a degree of unity, and, if we are to have that, it
follows, for one thing, that we cannot spend all our time in controversy
and fighting with each other -- maybe 99 per cent of the time, but not
quite 100 per cent."

Muste's biographer follows that same 99 percent formula for a number
of chapters, covering the infighting of the activists, the organizing of
the unemployed, the forming of the American Workers Party in 1933, and
in 1934 the Auto-Lite strike in Toledo, Ohio, that led to the formation
of the United Auto Workers. The unemployed, joining in the strike on
behalf of the workers, were critical to success, and their commitment to
do so may have helped the workers decide to strike in the first place.
Muste was central to all of this and to progressive opposition to
fascism during these years. The sit-down strike at Goodyear in Akron was
led by former students of Muste.

Muste sought to prioritize the struggle for racial justice and to
apply Gandhian techniques, insisting on changes in culture, not just
government. "If we are to have a new world," he said, "we must have new
men; if you want a revolution, you must be revolutionized." In 1940,
Muste became national secretary of FOR and launched a Gandhian campaign
against segregation, bringing on new staff including James Farmer and
Bayard Rustin, and helping to found the Congress of Racial Equality
(CORE). The nonviolent actions that many associate with the 1950s and
1960s began in the 1940s. A Journey of Reconciliation predated the
Freedom Rides by 14 years.

Muste predicted the rise of the Military Industrial Complex and the
militarized adventurism of the post-World War II United States in 1941.
Somewhere beyond the comprehension of most Americans, and even his
biographer, Muste found the wisdom to continue opposing war during a
second world war, advocating instead for nonviolent defense and a
peaceful, cooperative, and generous foreign policy, defending the rights
of Japanese Americans, and once again opposing a widespread assault on
civil liberties. "If I can't love Hitler, I can't love at all," said
Muste, articulating the widespread commonsense that one should love
one's enemies, but doing so in the primary case in which virtually
everyone else, to this day, advocates for the goodness of all-out
vicious violence and hatred.

Of course, those who had opposed World War I and the horrible
settlement that concluded it, and the fueling of fascism for years --
and who could see what the end of World War II would bring, and who saw
the potential in Gandhian techniques -- must have had a harder time than
most in accepting that war was inevitable and World War II justified.

Muste, I am sure, took no satisfaction in watching the U.S.
government create a cold war and a global empire in line with his own
prediction. Muste continued to push back against the entire institution
of war, remarking that, "the very means nations use to provide
themselves with apparent or temporary 'defense' and 'security'
constitute the greatest obstacle to the attainment of genuine or
permanent collective security. They want international machinery so that
the atomic armaments race may cease; but the atomic armaments race has
to stop or the goal of the world order recedes beyond human reach."

It was in this period, 1948-1951 that MLK Jr. was attending Crozer
Theological Seminary, attending speeches by, and reading books by,
Muste, who would later advise him in his own work, and who would play a
key role in urging civil rights leaders to oppose the war on Vietnam.
Muste worked with the American Friends Service Committee, and many other
organizations, including the Committee to Stop the H-Bomb Tests, which
would become the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE);
and the World Peace Brigade.

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Muste warned against a U.S. war on Vietnam in 1954. He led opposition
to it in 1964. He struggled with great success to broaden the anti-war
coalition in 1965. At the same time, he struggled against the strategy
of watering down war opposition in an attempt to find broader appeal. He
believed that "polarization" brought "contradictions and differences"
to the surface and allowed for the possibility of greater success. Muste
chaired the November 8 Mobilization Committee (MOBE) in 1966, planning a
massive action in April 1967. But upon returning from a trip to Vietnam
in February, giving talks about the trip, and staying up all night
drafting the announcement of the April demonstration, he began to
complain of back pain and did not live much longer.

He did not see King's speech at Riverside Church on April 4. He did
not see the mass mobilization or the numerous funerals and memorials to
himself. He did not see the war ended. He did not see the war machine
and war planning continue as if little had been learned. He did not see
the retreat from economic fairness and progressive activism during the
decades to come. But A.J. Muste had been there before. He'd seen the
upsurges of the 1920s and 1930s and lived to help bring about the peace
movement of the 1960s. When, in 2013, public pressure helped stop a
missile attack on Syria, but nothing positive took its place, and a
missile attack was launched a year later against the opposite side in
the Syrian war, Muste would not have been shocked. His cause was not the
prevention of a particular war but the elimination of the institution
of war, the cause also of the new campaign in 2014 World Beyond War.

What can we learn from someone like Muste who persevered long enough
to see some, but not all, of his radical ideas go mainstream? He didn't
bother with elections or even voting. He prioritized nonviolent direct
action. He sought to form the broadest possible coalition, including
with people who disagreed with him and with each other on fundamental
questions but who agreed on the important matter at hand. Yet he sought
to keep those coalitions uncompromising on matters of the greatest
importance. He sought to advance their goals as a moral cause and to win
over opponents by intellect and emotion, not force. He worked to change
world views. He worked to build global movements, not just local or
national. And, of course, he sought to end war, not just to replace one
war with a different one. That meant struggling against a particular
war, but doing so in the manner best aimed at reducing or abolishing the
machinery behind it.

David Swanson is the author of "When the World Outlawed War," "War Is A Lie" and "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union." He blogs at http://davidswanson.org and http://warisacrime.org and works for the online (more...)